Loops

it bangs on all day
and we’re shown something similar
the next night, so familiar
and repetitive is the footage
in the valleys Yugoslavia
as War appals unchanged
that I feel as loose & nowhere
as the displaced peoples leaving
with their favourite tools
and fork sets,the carpets, their
rolled up children with faces
like lace curtains, dodging tracers
from the battlements, rounds
pounding into hillsides, pulled back
to earth by the curvatures in Time;
and it comeswith a sense of staying on,
I recognisenow, the same feeling :
of pantomime.or make-believe
as five or six years old
I watched the soldiers filmed
in black & white Vietnam
cigarettes in helmets
deposited by chopper
adult teens camouflaged
with the American dream.
M_, now in 1991, comforting her mother
in Serbian, on the landline
as bombing starts, is drying
her tears on a tea towel
she had over her shoulder
cooking spiced pork and rice
wrapped in cabbage leaves
drinking cask red, bare legs
below a t-shirt; 4 fingers
of rounded front. soft, tidy
dark lip’d, and hunted I stand
behind and take her olive breasts,
conical shapes, my toe gap
stroking herankle, bellyfat
coming back, a sore back
so no more swimming. I run
a finger hip to hip, following
the overhang, lift it with both
hand and forearm, tightening her front.
she is craving something sweet
and sends me out, a few minutes
walk, to buy a bag or two
of forget yr’self, and we smoke
it past midnight emptying the merlot,
bladder-fools, more out than in
but the next morning she’s risen
smoothingher dark stockings on
while I groan around her coffee
grinds, swollen in tactless
concentration, happier than average
because I’ll have the flat and the
last of the weed and wine dregs
to myself for breakfast when she’s gone to work.

Love this. Coverage I remember. Maybe playing on loop now. Same repetitive surrealism.
Rolled up children…
Groan around her coffee grinds …
Love them in particular and the very real but self-centred ending.
In the end we’re alone.

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